At the same moment, in the same events, in what is by some standards an athletically underdeveloped country, a combination of propitious circumstances has brought forth two world-beating runners. Nobody can hope to account for this, but the luck is worth glorying in. It embraces even the principals' names: Coe and Ovett - as snappy as trademarks, and eminently saleable on the vowel-happy continent of Europe where the pair's records have mostly been set. One thinks of them as a pair not on account of their resemblances, of course, but because they seem to have agreed so precisely and comprehensively to differ. Each action of the one, on the track or off, apparently helps the other to define, by opposites, the way he wishes to present himself. They match in the same way that a plug matches a socket. And which is which? Difficult to say until a fuse blows in one of the parties, and it hasn't blown yet.

LRB 1 October 1981 | PDF Download